Well, I’d have to say the 2007 trip to the Titcomb Basin area of the Wind River mountains was a success. We appreciate everyone who followed the trip online here at www.jercore.com, and especially those that posted comments while we were gone. Posting the dispatches was really fun, however, they weren’t as streamlined as we would have liked. We couldn’t get the Sat phone to work with the laptop. That’s the reason for: a. very short posts (I called them into Meagen’s, Dave and my assistant, voice mail and then she transcribed them and posted them on the site–BTW, THANK YOU SO MUCH MEAGEN!!!!!) ; b. no pictures while we were gone; c. some miscommunication and delays, i.e. Tyson’s needs kept him in camp on summit day as opposed to his knees. 
Next extended Jercore trip we will work on that and hope to have more technical abilities in the backcountry. We’ll post GPS coordinates too like a few of you suggested.
For this final dispatch, rather than give you a play-by-play of our trip, I thought I’d just put down some highlights and things that struck me while I thought about it the last 2 days.
Most of us hiked right around 39 miles total. We covered just over 6,000 feet of elevation gain and loss over those miles. Tyson was a bit less, Dave and Elwon a bit more (they took a ‘short-cut’ back from Fremont Peak). We talked with quite a few different groups, and surprisingly, we didn’t met a single person from Wyoming (if you exclude the pack train cowboys hauling gear in for climbers, but hey, they’re working, they don’t count). New York, New Hampshire, Indiana, Calgary, California, Colorado, and more I can’t remember. We met Randy Younger from Durango, CO who accompanied us on our summit push. We’ll met up with Randy sometime down the road for a trip to the San Juan Mountains in Southwestern Colorado. We met Hawkeye, a long-distance thru-hiker who is working on his 2nd thru-hike of the Contentinal Divide Trail. He’s already done the Appalachian and the Pacific Coast trials each twice. He’s approaching 14,000 miles of hiking. After this season, he’ll be a double triple-crowner. Makes our 39 miles look a little puny.
The weather was PERFECT. Except for a 15 minute light hail storm right after our tents where up at our first camping spot, we had mostly blue skies and good temps–not too hot, not too cold. Last year I think the weather service messed up my weather request because we ended up with a winter storm that kicked us right out of those mountains. This year, the boys at the NWS in Riverton got it spot on. Maybe it was the $100 I included in the good weather request submission I mailed to them.
Besides a few blisters and the common aches and pains you’d expect when you take a bunch of dudes that sit in front of computers all day and ram a wilderness adventure down our throats, health for everyone was great. Tyson did have some knee pains (although having special needs might be better than knee pain, we might be able to get some grants or something for future trips, and for sure Tyson got some ribbing from us over that when we read it with Mikal’s comment) from his days of being a catcher so he opted out of the summit push with its amount of extremely steep vertical, but we’ll get him back up there someday and on top of that mountain. (helicopters can fly to 13,745 feet no problem) At least for me, pushing up to that summit after a lot of backpacking to get there with the altitude sucking the oxygen out of my lungs was easily in the top 5 most difficult things I’ve ever done.
Let’s see. With the animals. We didn’t see really anything of note. No bears (which is good because I’ve perfected my 1 arm pepper spray jam in their gaping maw while my other arm rams a pocket knife to the base of the skull maneuver, and it’s not very comfortable for the bears). No major mammals. A few birds here and there. Speaking of birds, two seagulls had occupied Pothole Lake where we camped. Talk about an invasive non-native species. We’re at over 10,000 feet ABOVE sea level and HUNDREDS of miles from an ocean and there are 2 seagulls hanging out. Someone should buy them a GPS, they’re lost man. A few vermin (a.k.a. chipmunks and squirrels, a.k.a. other misc. rodents, a.k.a. mice who we learned can get into your parked cars at the trailhead and steal only the nuts and candy, leaving the raisins behind, from Nate’s bag of trail mix left in my Explorer and deposit those juicy goodies along with other pilfered goods in a nest built in the trunk of Tyson’s Jetta that was parked a good 100 feet away–I kid you not about this, damn mice. Vermin I tell you!) Finally, I’m especially excited to report that the group received exactly 0-zero-nada-zip mosquito bites on the trip. And that’s saying something. I’ve been in the Wind Rivers with mosquitoes so bad I bailed on a trip several days early just to get out of there.
For some reason, we also discovered enough clothing to outfit a small army. We found 2 pairs of jeans, 1 pair of underwear, 1 jock strap, 2 gloves (matching pair nonetheless), 1 shoelace, and 1 wool sock. And we weren’t looking for clothing, that’s just what was laying around or placed under some rocks that we happened to turn over. I bet there’s money to be made turning rocks over in the Wind Rivers, gathering this clothing, and then selling it on eBay as collector items. Maybe Doba needs a new supplier for Wind River abandoned and partial decomposed clothing. It was nuts.
Finally, we all learned a lot more about each other. Maybe a lot more than we should ever know, but it made for fun times. I think trips like this help us learn more about ourselves most of all.
Anyway, good times. Good trip. Good to be back.
Until next adventure…
All is well. Out.
To view a complete gallery of all the pics we took on the trip, go here.
